Battery entrepreneurs and established industry ‘big players’ are being urged to take advantage of a wealth of support said to be on offer from global investors.
The EV batteries and stationary storage market is now “astronomically large”— and has caught the attention of venture capitalists, according to the CEO of Volta Energy Technologies Jeffrey Chamberlain (pictured right).
Chamberlain, who was given entrepreneurial leave from the US Argonne National Laboratory to start Volta, which officially launched last December, said investors are lining up to back the battery storage sector.
“We’re aiming to serve the entrepreneurs who need capital, but also those who need advice and technical help that they might not normally get,” Chamberlain told last week’s International Battery Seminar and Exhibit in Florida.
Volta’s founding investors are Exelon— the biggest utility in the US— and lithium supplier Albermarle.
“We want Volta to help build ventures and leverage government research in the US and Europe to fund technologies,” said Chamberlain who, with the US Department of Energy, led moves to successfully transfer advanced battery technology from Argonne to LG Chem, BASF, General Motors, Toda Kogyo, General Electric and others.
“Right now we have capital in the low nine figures that we aim to invest over the next 10 years,” Chamberlain added.
Volta’s links with Argonne, plus its investment potential, means the company can fund research in the US lab “that helps start ups and serves the big corporates who are trying to define the technologies most likely to be commercialised in future”.
“Through our research contract with Argonne, Volta performs research to validate technology from any source and solve technical challenges in otherwise valuable propositions,” the company said. “Argonne is the world leader in analysing, inventing, developing, testing, and scaling of early-stage energy storage materials and systems.”
